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September 20, 2013

[Skeptics — and there are plenty in the National Security Council, the Pentagon, America’s intelligence agencies and Congress — are not so optimistic. They think Mr. Obama runs the risk of being dragged into long negotiations and constant games of hide-and-seek that, ultimately, will result in little change in the status quo. They argue that the president’s hesitance to pull the trigger on Tomahawk strikes on Syria nearly two weeks ago, and the public and Congressional rebellion at the idea of even limited military strikes, were unmistakable signals to the Syrian and Iranian elites that if diplomacy fails, the chances of military action ordered by the American president are slight.]

WASHINGTON — Only two weeks after Washington and the nation were
debating a unilateral military strike on Syria that was also intended as a
forceful warning to Iran about its nuclear program, President Obama finds
himself at the opening stages of two unexpected diplomatic initiatives with
America’s biggest adversaries in the Middle East, each fraught with opportunity
and danger.

Without much warning, diplomacy is suddenly alive again after a
decade of debilitating war in the region. After years of increasing tension
with Iran, there is talk of finding a way for it to maintain a face-saving
capacity to produce a very limited amount of nuclear fuel while allaying fears
in the United States and Israel that it could race for a bomb.

Syria, given little room for maneuver, suddenly faces imminent
deadlines to account for and surrender its chemical weapons stockpiles — or
risk losing the support of its last ally, Russia.

For Mr. Obama, it is a shift of fortunes that one senior American
diplomat described this week as “head spinning.”

In their more honest moments, White House officials concede they
got here the messiest way possible — with a mix of luck in the case of Syria,
years of sanctions on Iran and then some unpredicted chess moves executed by
three players Mr. Obama deeply distrusts: President Bashar al-Assad of Syria,
President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, and Iran’s erratic mullahs. But, the
officials say, these are the long-delayed fruits of the administration’s
selective use of coercion in a part of the world where that is understood.

“The common thread is that you don’t achieve diplomatic progress
in the Middle East without significant pressure,” Benjamin J. Rhodes, a deputy
national security adviser, said Thursday. “In Syria, it was the serious threat
of a military strike; in Iran it was a sanctions regime built up over five
years.”

Skeptics — and there are plenty in the National Security Council,
the Pentagon, America’s intelligence agencies and Congress — are not so
optimistic. They think Mr. Obama runs the risk of being dragged into long
negotiations and constant games of hide-and-seek that, ultimately, will result
in little change in the status quo. They argue that the president’s hesitance
to pull the trigger on Tomahawk strikes on Syria nearly two weeks ago, and the
public and Congressional rebellion at the idea of even limited military
strikes, were unmistakable signals to the Syrian and Iranian elites that if
diplomacy fails, the chances of military action ordered by the American
president are slight.

“These two situations are deeply intertwined,” said Dennis B.
Ross, who served as Mr. Obama’s lead adviser on Iran for the first three years
of his presidency, and who argued for attacking Syria after the Aug. 21 gas
attacks that killed more than a thousand civilians. “If the Syrians are forced
to give up their weapons, it will make a difference to the Iranian
calculation,” and would raise the prospects of some deal with Tehran.

“If the Syrians can drag this out and give up just a little, that
will send a very different message to the supreme leader,” he said.

Hovering over it all is a third negotiation: Secretary of State
John Kerry’s effort to jump-start talks between Israel and the Palestinians, a
political minefield that Mr. Obama and Mr. Kerry’s predecessor, Hillary Rodham
Clinton, for the most part avoided.

All these possibilities could evaporate quickly; just ask the
State Department diplomats who in the last years of the Bush administration
thought they were on the way to keeping North Korea from adding to its nuclear
arsenal, or the Clinton administration officials who thought they were on the
verge of a Middle East peace deal.

Mr. Obama will most likely know whether the Syrian accord stands a
chance of success long before he knows whether the sudden Iranian charm
offensive is real or a mirage. The Syrians now face a series of deadlines. The
first comes this weekend, when they must issue a declaration of their chemical
stocks that “passes the laugh test,” as Gary Samore, Mr. Obama’s former top
adviser on unconventional weapons, put it earlier in the week.

The State Department has hinted that the Saturday deadline is not
hard and fast. And while Mr. Assad will presumably admit to quantities roughly
in line with the amounts that the United States and Russia have estimated are
in his hands, the harder question for the Syrian leader is whether to lead
inspectors to every depot, every warehouse, every research and development
facility. That is supposed to happen in November, with total disarmament by the
middle of next year.

But enforcing that will be difficult. So much time will have
passed since the Aug. 21 gas attack that Mr. Obama will no longer be able to
threaten a strike as punishment for use of the weapons. Instead, he would have
to justify any military action as an enforcement of a United Nations resolution
that he does not yet have in hand, and that is unlikely to authorize the use of
force. White House officials say they are not especially concerned: with the
world watching and United Nations inspectors on the ground to supervise the
elimination of stockpiles, “we would have an effective form of deterrence”
against another use of the weapons, Mr. Rhodes argued.

Iran is trickier. The coming week will be about symbolism,
including the possibility that Mr. Obama and the newly elected Iranian
president, Hassan Rouhani, will arrange to run into each other at the United
Nations, where they will both be for the annual General Assembly session. But
that would be the easy part. Iranians are desperate for relief from sanctions
that have cut their oil revenue by more than half, crashed their currency and
made international banking all but impossible, but they may not understand the
price of relief. “I suspect they are heading for sticker shock,” one official
deeply involved in developing the American negotiating strategy said recently.

If rumors prove true, the Iranians may offer to close Fordo, the
nuclear facility whose existence was revealed in 2009. The site’s major value
to Iran is that it is largely invulnerable to Israeli bombing, but it is so
small that it may be more valuable to Mr. Rouhani as a bargaining chip.

American officials say they understand that Iran will need some
kind of enrichment ability to assure its own people that it has retained its
“nuclear rights,” as its negotiators say. The question is how much. Unless a
good deal of the current infrastructure is dismantled, Iran will be able to
maintain a threshold nuclear capability — that is, it will be just a few weeks,
and a few screwdriver turns, from building a weapon. It is unclear whether Mr.
Obama can live with that; the Israelis say they cannot.

But the big picture for Mr. Obama is that after weeks of appearing
uncertain of his way, he now has a chance to pull off something big. “If he
gets this right in the ninth inning, no one will remember what the fourth and
fifth inning looked like,” David Axelrod, Mr. Obama’s longtime political
strategist, said Thursday. But the president is nowhere near the ninth inning;
the game is only now getting interesting.

This article has been revised to
reflect the following correction:

Correction: September 20, 2013

An
earlier version of this article misidentified the type of weapons stocks that
Syria must issue a declaration about this weekend, under a proposed accord.
They are chemical stocks, not nuclear stocks.